Burglar Nabbed By Backup Program

Bruce Perens writes "A Berkeley, California, burglar engineered his own arrest, and that of his girlfriend, when he stole a laptop and used it as his personal computer. He didn't realize that the laptop had an automatic backup program, and that the photos he took were being copied to his victim's backup repository. Berkeley police recognized him, and his location, from the photos."

Re:A product here?

[Nikker]

Since this is /., 1 cron job and an addition to your /etc/rc.local(or distro equiv.) would do the trick. You could first use mencoder to capture and video sources (using command line it will take snaps at intervals all on its own) and rsync as you cron job taking the diffs of the whole drive to online storage, bonus points to trigger a sync the moment the network route becomes available. Nifty idea would be to set up a gmail account and use it to store incremental backups rather than the original image, 7-8 GB of diffs could likely go a long way.

Well that's just stupid

[drsquare]

You don't use the laptop you steal, you sell it down the pub or gut it for parts.

Amateur.

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[Dr_Barnowl]

If the owner was complying with the Windows EULA, the license sticker was firmly applied to the computer, so he only needs a install disk ; the serial number is already there.

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[IBBoard]

Well, all he needs is an OEM install disk for the right edition. I've tried an OEM license with a Retail disk after wiping a laptop and it won't work (even thought they're the same product and it was the serial from the bottom). Much easier to install Linux instead ;)

Re:Which backup program

[David Gerard]

Cygwin does crontabs very nicely to do all sorts of Unixy things. It's a fantastic way to make a Windows box halfway sanely usable. Particularly if you set up sshd.

Re:Which backup program

[asdf7890]

Cygwin does crontabs very nicely to do all sorts of Unixy things. It's a fantastic way to make a Windows box halfway sanely usable. Particularly if you set up sshd.

Seconded. rsync+ssh is great for backups either directly on Unix-a-like systems or via the CygWin distribution on Windows. Setup is a bit manual of course, but if you have the time you can use the tools to create a very flexible and reliable setup.